Socialists of Reddit, what are your opinions on automation?

In society where the workers own and democratically control the enterprise in which they work, that would be socialism. In such a society it seems evident that the workers would use automation to improve or at least maintain their productivity while giving themselves more leisure time.

The way in which a capitalist society is structured forces (or at the very least encourages) the maximising of corporate profits. How do you maximise corporate profit? You sell your goods and services at the highest possible price you can get away with and you want to minimise the cost of production as much as you can. If you could somehow replace those expensive workers with automated equipment then you could cut a huge expenditure, which would lead to huge profit gains.

History has shown us that if corporations can decrease the cost of production (i.e. the cost of paying the workers) they will. We have seen that manufacturing and other industries have left the western world and moved to the developing world where wages are much cheaper. It seems obvious that once corporations can replace workers with automation then they will. You already see it happening today.

So what does automation mean in a capitalist society? Well first, it means that workers will be replaced by robots because robots are cheaper to run. So that means mass unemployment for the working class. Corporations will no longer have to pay workers, so as the rest of society becomes poorer, corporations will become wealthier. This will obviously concentrate power and wealth even more then it is today.

In a capitalist society I don't see anyway to prevent this from happening. This is how a capitalist system is designed to work. The only way to prevent this from happening is to change the system.

/r/socialism Thread